Is there a alternative to LingQ for reading while marking known/unknown words?

[Friday]

I tested out LingQ, and though it helped me read through some interesting eBooks that I had, I was frustrated by their dictionaries. Some definitions had pinyin, some didn't. Some used numbered pinyin, some had tone marks. And the definitions themselves weren't consistently written either. It had access to a pop-up of MDBG's dictionary, but it wouldn't let me just use those definitions. I understand dictionaries are difficult to write, but this was too amateurish to warrant me spending money on the product.

 

Is there any other tool that achieves a similar result, assisting with reading while also color-coding the passage. I've purchased Pleco, which seems to allow me to at least add unknown words to flash cards, but I can't see a way for me to mark and color-code known, unknown, and unread words as LinqQ does -- or in the very least, to mark in the text which words I've added already to flash cards so I don't constantly hit "Add to flash cards" to words already added.

[Jan Finster]

I have used Lingq since I started learning Chinese in 2019 and I am a big fan. I take your point related to dictionary definitions, which have frustrated me lately. They changed to Deepl, and even though it should be amazing, it often messes things up. I am not a beginner any more, so I do not really care about perfect definitions since I can mostly figure out the meaning even if the dictionary is not exact.

I seriously doubt there is a product out there that offers the range of features Lingq does. Many defintions of more than 2 characters are community based on Lingq. E.g. for instance I often add definitions. Some people (including me)  do not care about the pinyin and will not include them.

 

Lingq is really dirt cheap for what it offers. Especially now that there is a 40% black Friday discount...

[becky82]

There's Dong Chinese, MyLingua, and LanguageCrush (and ReadLang which I haven't used).  Reddit posts like this and this make it a hard "pass" for me when it comes to LingQ.

 

Edit: Oh yeah, Pleco also has a reader.  I haven't tried it though.

[Jan Finster]

On 11/26/2023 at 10:58 PM, becky82 said:

Reddit posts like this and this make it a hard "pass" for me when it comes to LingQ.

 

This is not really complicated anymore: https://forum.lingq.com/t/how-do-i-canceldelete-my-account/6877

 

You still do need to downgrade first and then you can cancel. The reason is that too many people had second thoughts and asked Lingq a couple of months later if they could reactivate their account and restore their data. 

 

While Lingq was somewhat poorly responsive to user's requests, they have massively improved their system and interaction with users since Covid.

 

Lingq never had much of a fanbase here and I have  no incentive to advertise it here. However, there are a lot of students of Chinese on Lingq that are seriously amazing/gifted and it is great to learn from them.

[malazann]

i assume you don't care about the flash card functionality then? and just want known/unknown words to be marked? if so, i've recently come across Lute which is a free open-source alternative. Introduction - Lute manual (jzohrab.github.io) 

unfortunately it has some hurdles for the non-techies. but not too difficult. also can't use it on phone

 

 

[sanchuan]

If your main concern is telling 'known words' from 'unknown words', I seem to recall that pleco reader does mark words that have already been added to the user's collection (to avoid double entries).

 

Selecting any length of text in the reader prompts a plus button to appear on top; if the character/word/phrase selected is already present in your collection, then the plus button appears encased in a square. I doubt that function has changed in recent updates.

[mikelove]

On 11/28/2023 at 12:31 PM, sanchuan said:

If your main concern is telling 'known words' from 'unknown words', I seem to recall that pleco reader does mark words that have already been added to the user's collection (to avoid double entries).

 

Selecting any length of text in the reader prompts a plus button to appear on top; if the character/word/phrase selected is already present in your collection, then the plus button appears encased in a square. I doubt that function has changed in recent updates.

This is indeed still supported, yes. Color highlighting + indicating that a word has previously been looked up are on our to-do list.

[Steve Kane]

I was also using LingQ for about a year but I found it quite buggy. I really liked how you could track known/unknown words, but the definitions for some words were very bad quality and the way that it separated Chinese characters into words also didn't work very well.

 

Afterwards, I played around with DuChinese a bit which was slightly less buggy, but also it didn't track known/unknown words very well.

 

Recently I've been using Mandarin Mosiac, which so far seems to be separating out known/unknown words very well. It highlights the unknown words in blue, and I really like how it only shows you sentences with one unknown word so you never get anything too difficult.

 

I'm not sure when it will be fully released, they're updating it regularly, but I followed the app on MandarinMosaic.com and managed to get an invite to the beta testing program. Maybe you can ask the developer for an invite?

[lordsuso]

This is probably not what you are looking for, but this is how I do it with Koreader on an e-reader:

 

- Before I start reading a new book, I export my flashcards as a dictionary into Koreader

- This custom dict is the "main" dict, so whenever I click on a word it will appear first if I already have a flashcard for this word. So it's easy to know whether I should highlight the word (and sentence).

- At the end of the book I export the highlights and I add them to my flashcards.

 

If it's a long book I might update the custom dict every few chapters.